“We’ve known each other since we were in the first grade,” he said. “We dated once when we were 15, and it didn’t work out. We remained best friends even after we broke up. We both dated other people for like five years. When I heard that she had ended her other relationship — this was last spring — I moved in for the kill. We kissed, and that was it. We dated for probably six months, and we got engaged last December, around Christmas time.”

Thomas knew the perfect way to ask Lauren to be his wife. He enlisted the help of both their families, including his dad, songwriter Rhett Atkins, to help him pull off his romantic proposal.

“My family and her family all went to this one restaurant called Giovanni’s,” he said. “Me and Lauren are big on drinking wine and signing the bottles with a silver sharpie, dating them and putting them up in our house. I brought her upstairs to this room in Giovanni’s, and there was a bottle of wine sitting there. I pulled out a sharpie and put ‘Marry me’ on the bottle. Her mom cued ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ by Frank Sinatra and we danced. It was pretty awesome.”

The couple will tie the knot just outside Nashville later this month. In the meantime, Thomas is promoting his new single, “Beer with Jesus.” The song title might raise some eyebrows, but the lyrics are very personal to him.

“If Jesus was here today walking in the flesh like He was, back when He was here, I’d probably take him down to the Flying Saucer (a bar in Nashville) and order up a Newcastle and just pick His brain about life,” he said. “Ask Him if I’m doing alright, ask Him how some of the people in my life that are close to me that have died, how they’re doing in Heaven. It’s just a really personal song to me.”

Thomas will hit the road with Chris Young on Chris’s Liquid Neon Tour this fall.